Piano Jar and the Bulldozer

A little bit now about the excavation, which is not only what lured me to Taung but to South Africa. Taung is world famous, at least in scientific circles, for a fossilized skull often referred to as the “Taung child.” The story of its discovery has been retold so many times, that I dare not slog through the details once more here. Suffice it to say that the skull of a young juvenile, probably of age 3 or 4 when it died, drifted into a cave some 2 1/2 million years ago. It is a representative of our human ancestors, a species known scientifically as Australopithecus africanus, and was the first piece of evidence that human origins were in Africa. After this his diminutive skull was blasted out of the Buxton Limeworks in 1924, through a series of events, it was placed in a crate on a train, and made its way to Professor Raymond Dart, at Joburg’s University of the Witwatersrand. Dart has long been credited with the ‘discovery’ of the skull, but really he prepared it from its rock matrix, assessed its distinctive nature of what was then called an ‘ape-man,’ and published it as a new species of human ancestor in 1925. But it was discovered by the quarrier, particularly one M. De Bruyn.

What is relevant to our story here, is that Dart did not visit the site of Taung until 1947. He did so with a University of California expedition, which led to the first, and only, scientific excavation of the site ... until we came along in 1987, under the guidance of Dart’s successor, the venerable Professor Phillip V. Tobias.

My colleagues and students went to Taung to find fossilized bones of the mother, father, brother, distant cousin, or whatever relative we could find of that lost child. We didn’t find that fossil, but we found so very much more.

The fossils at Taung are encased in a reddish sandstone know as ‘breccia,’ which is basically an Italian word for ‘broken things’. Breccia form in caves made of limestone tufa, the formation of which is covered elsewhere on this site (taungskull.org). This meant that we had to excavate through the tufa roof of the caves to get down to the breccia with the broken bones. It’s rock to rock, and rock we did as in another story.

The fist year of the excavation we set up a small grid on an exposed section of breccia where some fossils of extinct baboons had been found in 1925 by Ales Hrdlička, after the first publication on the hominin juvenile. We thought it to be promising, but were frustrated when nothing came out at first. Excavations, as exciting as they may seem from the outside, often happen that way. But by the end of the first week we found our first fossil – a tiny rodent tooth. I got all excited and my students looked at me in bewilderment. “Dr. McKee, have you lost your mind? It’s just a rodent tooth!” I smiled through a long pause, and replied “But now we know we are digging in the right place, and will find much more.” More we did find, including some wonderful treasures. But we weren’t necessarily in the right place, at least not yet.

In 1989 ... seems so long ago, but also like yesterday ... we took a more sophisticated approach, and that is where ‘piano jar’ comes into the picture. We hired a professional surveyor to set up a more sophisticated grid system and rather than chip away at the face of the ancient cave we started working our way down from the top. That meant breaking our way through the limestone roof of the cave and into the solidified cave remains that encased the fossils. To do this we drilled holes through the rock with a Pianjar drill, which we affectionately called ‘piano jar.’ We’d then place 2 metal feathers, directed to control the direction of the rock break, and pound a wedge between them to break off blocks of potentially fossiliferous sandstone ‘breccia.’ The blocks were then broken down into smaller bits in a mock grid system, to keep track of where they came from, to find if they had fossils. Thousands were fossiliferous, as I had promised my students.

Fossil excavation at Taung with “piano jar” the yellow drill.

When one thinks of palaeontological excavations, one does not normally think of power drills. Normally one envisions somebody out in the dessert with a camel-hair brush whisking away sand, and voila, the Lucy skeleton! But in an environment like Taung, one has to think outside of the box. We had been drilling away on the Hrdlička pinnacle and finding cool extinct baboons, but neither kith nor kin of our lonely Australopithecus fossil.

Dozing off

So I started looking longingly at the Dart pinnacle, wondering if there was more there, in what would be older deposits. I looked at the pyramidal monument, with its peak allegedly being at the point of discovery of the Taung child, as best reconstructed at the time. Could there be something near there? Underneath the monument was gravel that had been brought in to secure the ground for the unveiling during a large celebration for the Taung Diamond Jubilee. Underneath the gravel was packed limedust, all of which had been brought in by bulldozer to cover the natural quarry floor. It didn’t belong there.

Meanwhile in our second year of excavations, there was roadwork going on nearby. The bridge over the Thamasikwa river had been taken out, and they were leveling the road for a new bridge. Hmmm, a bulldozer brought in the limedust and gravel overlying the quarry floor, could it not take it back away? After all, palaeontologists usually dig down, don’t they?

So we hired the bulldozer and dozer driver to come up to the fossil site and take away the overburden on a Saturday. It was probably the most fun Saturday morning I’ve ever had, even better than the Saturday morning cartoons I enjoyed as a young boy. My graduate student, Wallace J. Scott, and I sat and watched the bulldozer clear our way to more discoveries, as we smoked our tobacco pipes and perhaps had a beer or two each. We had him build a ramp to the top of the Dart pinnacle so we could easily get up to see what was there. I asked him if he could “accidentally” back into the monument; after all there might be something under there. He wouldn’t do that, and in retrospect for very good reason. But what a day!

Fossil excavation at Taung with “piano jar” the yellow drill.

Palaeontology is a strange profession in which one has to innovate to find fossils. Somehow, before I moved to South Africa, I never dreamed it would involve a large yellow drill to which I would become fondly attached, and a morning of bulldozing. But there we have it.